Hilde Van den Eynde 1963–2025

For over three decades, Hilde Van den Eynde shaped how Flemish readers understood science. As a science journalist for De Standaard, she made it her life’s work to translate complex research into clear, precise, and truthful stories—without sensationalism, and without shortcuts.

Van den Eynde trained as a biologist and completed a PhD on the evolution of bacteria. It was her love of language and her drive to explain that eventually brought her from the lab to the newsroom. She joined De Standaard in 1989 and remained a key figure on the science desk for the rest of her career. Over the years, she reported on everything from Nobel Prize ceremonies to cutting-edge cancer therapies, CRISPR technology, and the very first headlines about a “mysterieus marktvirus” that would later define the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her strength as a journalist lay not only in her knowledge but also in her restraint. She resisted black-and-white narratives and knew that good science, and good communication, lived in nuance. Her writing was elegant but never embellished. She asked careful questions, insisted on accuracy, and trusted readers to understand complexity, as long as it was explained well.

“Science takes away fear,” she once said. “It frees people from superstition. That’s a beautiful thing to be able to do.”

This belief guided her work. Whether explaining the risks of an asteroid strike or the promise of mRNA vaccines, Van den Eynde communicated to inform, not to impress, alarm, or simplify. She helped people feel less afraid not by softening reality, but by illuminating it.

Her work had impact well beyond the printed page. During the pandemic, as public trust in science hung in the balance, she was one of those voices who could explain complex biomedical breakthroughs with clarity and calm. Her early and careful coverage of immunotherapy, too, helped readers understand the revolutionary shifts taking place in oncology long before they became household terms.

However, Van den Eynde also knew that science is a human endeavor. Her writing blended rigor with warmth, occasionally allowing humor and curiosity to surface more playfully: in blog posts about haute couture Nobel banquets, or experiments with a DIY CRISPR kit at her kitchen table. Even when writing about her own illness (cancer, which she lived with and worked through for nearly two decades) she remained characteristically measured. She wrote about it once. Honestly. Briefly. And then returned to her work.

Colleagues remember her not just for her journalistic ethics, but for her quiet presence: thoughtful, generous with her knowledge, and unshakably committed to the reader. “The ideal,” she once said, “is to tell a story that as many people as possible find interesting—using as few words as possible.” That discipline defined her style, but also her integrity.

She believed that trust is not won through noise, but through clarity. That science deserves care. That journalism deserves precision. And that the public deserves both.

Hilde Van den Eynde leaves behind her husband and two daughters. She also leaves behind generations of readers who were better informed because of her, and a community of science communicators who will continue to follow the path she helped set.